Poetry Potluck: Embodying Art

This is my response to this week's Poetry Potluck, which I discovered thanks to a link over at Porky's Expanse!. The theme for the week is "Doubts, Fear, Inhibitions, and Hesitations."

I feel compelled to confess that this is not, strictly speaking, a response to the Poetry Potluck prompt. It is actually a poem that I wrote several years ago, in response to another poem by a friend of mine that touched on body modification. I didn't manage to get this up in time to get it on the Poetry Potluck linky-list, ironically, largely because I was hesitant to post it, being somewhat doubtful of the appropriateness of recycling my used poetry for the blog. But it seemed to fit the theme better than anything I was likely to come up with in my current sleep-deprived state, so, despite my fears, here it is.

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Embodying Art

In the lines we create there always will dwell
the unspoken span of a once-whispered spell.
We are bound by the hopes and the hells that we trace,
by the myths we degrade and those we embrace,
implacably after pursued by the voice
that we once drew to life by an unmindful choice

and the reverberations will shatter and break
into shards the clear image we tried so to make,
to present to the world our most beautiful face.
And the wounds that those fragments engrave as we race
to contain them before they can pierce to our souls
define our new features, leave ridges and holes

where before there was softness, a smooth flowing curve;
now the scar tissue binds and compresses a nerve
and the voice, the vibrations that echo and hum,
still cannot be silenced. Relief does not come.
But the traceries deep in our minds hold us still,
bound beyond renunciation or will.